A couple of days ago, I needed a minor customization in my Outlook 2007. Being a developer, I just opened the integrated development environment in Office and wrote some quick VBA code. I would have done it with C# and VisualStudio, but to be honest, every time I start to work with Office components, especially Outlook, I struggle with the unnecessary complexity and the low quality COM-based API. While I was coding, I began to think about why there seemed to be virtually no effort at Microsoft to rewrite and redesign important applications like Outlook in the near future. It virtually made no sense to somehow abandon a successful product like that.

A couple of hours later, I checked my RSS reader and found an interesting article about the upcoming Exchange 2010 (or "E14" for short). Suprinsingly, when I took a look at the screenshots, they answered my earlier question.

Microsoft has not only started to rewrite its most important applications, in fact, they have completely redesigned every single one of them. Following the vision of its Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy, Microsoft has finally understand the possibilities and the importance of the web. The new Microsoft Exchange 2010 has an Outlook interface that should be able to really compete with the “old” desktop client and as we all know, this is only part of a complete Microsoft Office application suite running within the browser.

When we started to see the web as platform for our business back in 2004 when I took over as Chief Software Architect at netzkern and our company began to focus all efforts on web and service-oriented technologies, there were a lot of people who disagreed with me on that vision. Up until today, history has proven us right and we’re looking forward what the web will bring to us in the next 5 years.